Monday, December 4, 2006

Heidegger's Hut

There are several promising-looking books coming out this month. I've been piling them up on my desk, and as I get a chance to look at them over the course of the next couple of weeks, I'll blog about them.

The top book on the pile is "Heidegger's Hut" (MIT), by architect and Cardiff University lecturer Adam Sharr. Heidegger's three-room mountain cabin, built in 1922 in the Black Forest, is iconic to 20th-century philosophy. Just as we think of Sartre at Les Deux Magots, we think of Heidegger writing "Being and Time" (1927) at his hut. In that book, Heidegger suggested that the age-old "question of Being" could only be answered by a certain type of philosopher, one who performs on himself a rigorous phenomenological exercise, an ascetic spiritual-intellectual effort to suspend ordinary consciousness until elusive Being is coaxed to "show itself from itself in the very way in which it shows itself from itself." By hiking off the grid to his hut, pumping water and chopping wood, one could argue that Heidegger was self-consciously advertising himself as a living model of such an ascetic philosopher. At any rate, the book made him internationally famous and inspired all subsequent existentialists. NB: T.W. Adorno's "Jargon of Authenticity" is a fantastic takedown of Heidegger and the German youth who admired him.

An excellent essay by Ian Hunter, a professor at the University of Queensland (Australia), in the Autumn 2006 issue of Critical Inquiry, argues that the only aspect of all the competing academic discourses we've come to call Theory is precisely that: a phenomenology-inspired "philosophical ascesis associated with the cultivation of a particular intellectual persona," as he put it. Like Heidegger, the likes of Derrida, Kristeva, Althusser, and their intellectual heirs have hinted at their own sage-like abilities to see through the illusions of everyday life into the chaotic, anarchic, elusive realm of Being, argues Hunter. He also claims that this explains their cult-like appeal to intellectuals.

Anyway, "Heidegger's Hut" seeks insights into Heidegger's thought via studying in extreme detail the hut's design and furnishings. It's illustrated with 53 photographs. Check it out.

PS: Being a confirmed urbanite, I've always found Heidegger's rustication less inspiring than the example set by Sartre -- who, according to a possibly apocryphal story, before he developed his version of existentialism was having a drink with Raymond Aron, who had just returned from Berlin, one day in 1933. Aron pointed to an apricot cocktail and said, "You see, my dear fellow, if you were a phenomenologist, you could talk about this cocktail and make a philosophy out of it." According to Simone de Beauvoir, who was there, Sartre "turned pale with emotion," immediately bought a book on Heidegger's mentor, Husserl, and began reading it as he walked home.

Why hike to a mountain hut in order to become a philosopher, when you can get the same bang for your buck at a Parisian cocktail bar?

Posted by Joshua Glenn at 10:46 AM

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